Win rate comparison of archer vs cavalry civs in open map/Arabia excluding OP civs

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I wanted to see how the cavalry-archer meta is going in 1v1 open maps. I’ve excluded all civs that don’t have good cavalry or good archer. Also I didn’t consider Franks, Mayans and Chinese as they are almost universally agreed upon to be OP civs.

Since the list of OP civs is subjective as well as which are cavalry civs or archer civs, I have made 3 different lists of civs to analyze.

Cavalry Civs
List 1 - Berbers, Teutons, Huns, Poles, Lithuanians, Burgandians, Bulgarians, Persians, Khmer, Malians, Slavs, Sicilians, Magyars, Cumans, Spanish, Tatar
List 2 - Burgandians and Poles are excluded from list 1.
List 3 - Spanish and Tatar are excluded from list 2.

Archer Civs
List 1 - Vikings, Japanese, Italians, Portuguese, Malay, Dravidians, Vietnamese, Britons, Ethiopians, Saracens, Byzantines, Bohemians, Koreans
List 2 - Britons is removed from list 1.
List 3 - Byzantines is removed from list 2. (I know I should exclude Bohemians as well. I’m being lazy).

All stats are for 1700+ elo, 1v1 RM

Arabia
Stats from aoepulse.com

Arabia1
Arabia1916×601 70.3 KB

Arabia2
Arabia2846×555 65.8 KB

Arabia3
Arabia3920×553 67.5 KB

Open Maps
Stats from ageofstatistics.com

Open1
Open11007×600 74.6 KB

Open2
Open2921×557 73.6 KB

Open3
Open31012×556 70.1 KB

In conclusion, archer civs have around 46% win rate in open maps including Arabia while cavalry civs have around 49.8% win rate in open maps and 49.5% in Arabia particularly.

Edit: Removed Vikings from the list. They have 55%+ win rate which is pretty OP.

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2

I think a bigger conclusion is how OP Franks, Mayans, Chinese, Hindustanis and Gurjaras are. You don’t even have 50% win rate if you’re not playing these civilizations.

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I don’t get what the list thing is, you didn’t really explain the logic, reasoning, or purpose behind it, so it doesn’t make sense to me. Also, you spelt Burgundians wrong in your list of cav civs.

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4

The thread would be too long.

Lists are for difference in preference. Some people don’t consider some civs to be cav civs but others do. Same for archer civs.

For example, If I made only one list of cav civs, people would scream at me “Why you put x on the list? They are not cav civs” or “Why you didn’t put x on the list? They are a pure cav civs.” And I fear, they still will.

5

Well, I would suggest you go off how they are normally played, but then every civ would be an archer civ basically :joy:.

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6

So you want that people discuss statistics which they don’t understand? At least I also don’t get what the relation between the long, medium and short lists are. Thus, I consider them as three separately lists.

Some remarks only based on your shown results:

  • If civs of the same category play vs each other, then the win rate automatically “moves” towards 50% in your statistics. Since, your cavalary civs have made more matches, it is probably likely that more cavalary civs played vs each other than archer civs played vs each other.
    I’m not saying that it has a big impact on your results. However, I think it is worth to mention
  • Because of the previous point I think, I’d prefere a database which contains only matches where one of your archer civs played vs one of your cavalry civs (Assuming that your intention is to compare how archer civs perform vs cavalry civs!?)
  • Considering your final result stating that archer civs have 47% win rate in open maps and cavalry civs have around 49.8%. Is this just an observation or a proposal that archer civs need a buff / cavalry civs a nerf? If the latter one, your stats also show that this should probably not be answered globally. Looking at the stats for open maps, the win rate for each cavalry civs have a low deviation compared to the archer civs, which have the exceptional good vikings and exceptional bad protuguese, for example.
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7

That’s an obivous conclusion. If you make a list of civs with a win rate >50% then of course the combination of all other civs have a lower win rate than 50%. The same statement can be made about open maps, if you add to your mentioned OP civs the following civs: vikings, ehtiopians, berbers, teutons, huns, lithuanians and khmer.

BTW: how does the win rate look like if you swap viking with franks for example? I suppose the winrate of this modified “archer civ lists” is still less than 50%. Thus, franks are not OP anymore, but vikings are?
In other words, you shouldn’t call civs OP / underpowered based on the winrate of a whole category they are part of. If you think the win rate is a good metric to decide this, then just look at the win rate of the respective civ.

8

It is not that big difference in the end, I don’t know if you made this list to show that the upcoming xbow nerf is not justified, but you forgot that there is nothing like “Cav civs” or “archer” civs, this is just a general name. Most of the time I see the “cav” civs go MAA archers then xbows, then shift to their line later. On the other hand there are civs can do anything, Saracens have great camels and knights play, they have xbows and CA, same for Chinese with their tech tree and bonuses they can go cavs/archers, Italians, Portuguese can go both too.

What you show here is not more than a general winrate that have nothing to do with “archer/cav” civs.

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9

From your reply I can see you have understood quite a lot. 11

Not that much. Only to avoid comment like “Why x civ is or is not in the list”. If you want to put some weight, then it is the contribution of Burgandians, Poles, Tatars & Spanish on overall win rates of cav civs.

I don’t think archer civs play rate is such low. This is indeed a good observation anyway.

That will be very helpful. I wish there were some sites that do this. Currently we can find individual win rates of all civs against others but I never found a play rate of a particular match up like Huns vs Japanese.

I actually support upcoming archer upgrade nerf. Just kept a record which I’ll (hopefully) observe again 3-4 months after the patch.

I’m surprised at their performance. I think I should consider them as OP and exclude them from all three lists.

10

Pros regularly play archer into xbow for those cav civs in pro games.

11

Read the title as FU Cavalier civ vs non-FU Cavalier civ. I hope that will suit more to your preference.

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Ah, I thought you collected the data yourself.
This site provides the data. https://aoecompanion.com/stats/civs/huns?elo=0-99999&map=all_maps
However, it seems like only for approx the last 30 days. Thus, using also a filter for high-elo players you dont get many sample-matches. For example, there are only 13 matches “huns vs japanese on Arabia with >1650 elo”.

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I think it’s just a friendly reminder that even at 1700 + archer civs don’t dominate.

I also see the upcoming archer nerf critical cause to me it’s appearant that archers only on the highest level seem to have become a bit too strong but for the majority of the playerbase cav is still stronger.
I think archers need a compensational buff for the well-targeted high elo nerf that reduces the timing advantage.

Meanwhile, in general: I think that especially Castle age should take longer to research (Imp possibly too). The reason for that is the economical advantage you get by staying in the lower age, making it more viable to stay especially in feudal and using that eco advantage against a castle age player. A play that was formerly more common but has been abandoned by the meta almost completely. It seems the Castle age powerspike is too big in general, not only with regards to xbows.

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14

Outdated almost 1 year ago.

I used these 2 sites. Should have been clarified. Let me edit the post.
https://www.ageofstatistics.com/cohort_rm_solo_any.html

Don’t say like that. There is no archer/cav civs. All civs play MAA → Archer. And all civs that have knight, make some to kill siege.

15

First that’s not true. We still have scout openings. Note that also archers are intentionally made to be the strongest units in feudal. Like knights are the strongest in castle age. So it is absolutely legitimate for knight civs to open archers. Maybe it’s a bit more than we like in highest level of play.

But it’s definetely wrong that we would only see archer openings. And it is deceiving cause the knight civs still transition into knights in the most games. But seemingly a lot of people here ignore that. They just cherry-pick the archer openings and don’t speak about the fact that knights are still the strongest units in castle age.

And that’s why it is important to have these stats cause they show that the argumentation is flawed.

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16

This is why we need a statistics page about openings and tech transitions

For example, what is the win rate of arbalester, that is, the winrare for matches with arbalester. And pickrate?

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17

We have that here in this site

All scouts opening have (+) win rate. 3 out of top 5 openings are scout opening. Rest 2 are premill Drush.

Also this one gives you better idea.

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18

why are so many people opening archers if scout openers are better?

19

Interesting. I like the pickrate data for openings more tvan the wi rate. It is good that we can filtwr out civs

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20

it is not a thing only about winrate, its also to keep game exciting and other units shown during a match. I mean they are after viewership and a repetitive archer meta transition into something else is what we all see so they are changing it.